Just host your website as plain markdown or HTML on GitHub. They will be around for a long time and if not, the internet archive will still have a copy of your site.
Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
541–550 of 825 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#542Host the content/pages on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/ There's a pretty good chance their collection (and possibly the organization themselves) will be around in 500 yrs. 1 EB in 100 yrs will be trivial to host (probably the price of a loaf of bread), and your content will be accessible by anyone with a copy of that archive.
Host the content on the "open web" but make sure Archive and every other crawler keeps a copy.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it ? The language is evolving very fast. Compare English from the 50's to what is spoken now, take into account the major dialects around the world... I don't see much stability.
There are different kinds of stability. One is whether the same language is spoken informally. Another is whether people are able understand earlier texts. I'm pretty sure texts from the 20th and 19th century are commonly read in High School, TV shows from 1960s onward are watched, etc. Having the past ever-present makes it something current informal language relates to. Many, many people speaking English also create…
I have a book from the 1700s on my bedside table I can read just fine...
My lived experience is I can read texts from hundreds of years ago just fine. Old mate is struggling with 50s tv.
The only tip is to use stable language. IE don't use the term dab or vibe or whatever the latest fad niche speak is.
I think whoever is interested in a 500 year old website is going to be ok.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe also start a traditoin in your family to have many children and to memorise the website up to a single character, like a sacred text. Some texts survived long time in oral form, I heard. Forming the sources as a verse could help here. Mostly oriented to texts, altough images can be memorized in their hex encoding, for example.
You’re onto something here. Organized religions are some of the very few institutions that survived for thousands of years with little change.
> Organized religions are some of the very few institutions that survived for thousands of years with little change.
Which organized religion are you referring to here? All the big ones have changed immensely.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant…
Posting spoilers without a warning is extremely rude.
Tbf, as someone who's never read or heard of the book, it just seemed like an interesting quote about a hypothetical future for humanity. Definitely didn't occur to me it might be a spoiler.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#546The world wide web is only 28 years old. We've had computers for 76 years at this point. We're discussing this topic in modern English, but if you look back 500 years William Shakespeare wouldn't be born for another couple of generations: vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to Frisian than anythi…
Maybe also start a traditoin in your family to have many children and to memorise the website up to a single character, like a sacred text. Some texts survived long time in oral form, I heard. Forming the sources as a verse could help here. Mostly oriented to texts, altough images can be memorized in their hex encoding, for example.
Sounds like what they did in the Netflix show Travelers, where important information about the world was encoded into DNA and kept alive within the bodies of specific travelers, called Archivists. This allowed information to be transmitted over long periods of time to the Director.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's necessary to go into all this trouble. Tablets made of the much, much cheaper clay are still accessible today—4000 years after they were created.
But it wasn't just the act of creating some clay tablets - those particular clay tablets happen to have run the probability gauntlet successfully and came out the other side - just making a clay tablet and putting it in your closet is unlikely to produce the same results. The place you put the tablet is more important than the fact that it's a clay tablet in itself.
Mass production.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#548Print it out on acid-free paper with a stable, acid-free ink. Have it bound as a hardback, and seal it into a waterproof container. Entrust it to one of your children, tell them to keep it in a safe-deposit box and take it out once a year to share with their children, and to pass it on to their children with the same instructions. If you have it electronically, the absolute best case in 500 years is that it will be a…
The United States government studied this question and came to the conclusion of... acid free paper. So it's now law that "permanent" documents in the US are to be stored on acid free paper: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/perm/permpapr.... Some of us who remember the 5.25" floppy disks, the 3" "floppy" disks, the HUGE Zipdisks, the 5.25" spinning platter drives, the 2.5" spinning platter drives, then t…
Yea but there was that guy who built an arduino based contraption to read a Cray Supercomputer hard drive.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#549The world wide web is only 28 years old. We've had computers for 76 years at this point. We're discussing this topic in modern English, but if you look back 500 years William Shakespeare wouldn't be born for another couple of generations: vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to Frisian than anythi…
Maybe a better question is, what would HTML have looked like in the time of Shakespeare? Forsooth!
Haha, reminds me of "If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript"
https://www.amazon.com/Hemingway-Wrote-JavaScript-Angus-Crol...
which is actually kind of amusing and creative.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#550The world wide web is only 28 years old. We've had computers for 76 years at this point. We're discussing this topic in modern English, but if you look back 500 years William Shakespeare wouldn't be born for another couple of generations: vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to Frisian than anythi…
Maybe a better question is, what would HTML have looked like in the time of Shakespeare? Forsooth!
I was going to say (as if that were the main objection) that the = there was apocryphal, but I had my centuries wrong: Recorde invented it in the mid-16th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equals_sign#History
I wonder when angle braces were introduced?